South Africa’s President Urges Children to Play Chess

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has urged school children to play chess referring to it as one education tool that can strengthen a child’s mind.

39th World Chess Olympiad to Begin September 19

1376 chess players from 158 countries will participate in the 39th World Chess Olympiad to be held from September 19 to October 4, 2010 in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. How People Arrived Here: 39th World Chess Olympiad

Kasparov’s Futile Plea

I wanted to offer a footnote to my analysis yesterday of Gary Kasparov’s piece on computers and chess. I concluded with the observation that Kasparov was highly sympathetic to artificial intelligence research, the point of his essay being that...

Putting the Machine in Its Proper Place

The New York Review scored a real coup in getting Gary Kasparov as their reviewer for the MIT Press book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky. Having retained...

“Hurry Up Please It’s Time!”

I found it interesting that yesterday’s report of the study of brain regions that are active when actors perform described an experiment based on excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Having heard the poem read aloud several times...

In Search of Self

In The Remembered Present Gerald Edelman suggests that the fundamental problem of consciousness is how the mind, presumably as embodied by the brain, establishes a sense of self and, in particular, how the distinction between self and other is...

Former Chess Champion Bobby Fischer Dies At 64

Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer has died at the age of 64. A spokesman says Fischer died at a hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, but no cause of death has been reported.